Irish Emigration and The Tenure of Land in Ireland/Chapter 1

by Frederick Temple Blackwood

CHAPTER I.

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"If Ireland were a thousand miles away from us, all would be changed,—or the landlords would be exterminated by the vengeance of the people."

These are pregnant and comprehensive words: they envelope in the same stern condemnation, both the cultivators and the owners of the soil of Ireland. Their meaning cannot be mistaken: the term vengeance pre-supposes injury,—injury of as deep a dye, as the revenge it has evoked. Yet they express the genuine conviction of one of England's leading politicians, and consequently the opinion of many who confide in his judgment. By some they will be regarded as a rhetorical exaggeration of a partial truth. By others they have been resented as an ignoble calumny.

I do not myself venture to pronounce dogmatically between these conflicting conclusions; no man can hope in a hasty dissertation to determine the opinions of his fellow-countrymen on so vital a question; but, as a member of the obnoxious class referred to, I may be permitted to suggest the propriety of patiently examining the grounds which are supposed to justify these grave denunciations.

Perhaps the simplest method of conducting such an inquiry will be—first, to specify the charges against the landlords of Ireland, as set forth in the public manifestoes of such persons as may be supposed to speak with the greatest authority on the subject, and then to examine, one by one, the truth or falsehood of each. The vehement eloquence with which the wrongs of that country are invariably discussed, affords ample materials for framing the indictment,—a circumstance which relieves me from the invidious expedient of singling out any particular individual as our public prosecutor.

Stripped of all exaggerated phraseology the accusations with which the landlords are assailed may be condensed into the following series of propositions.

1. That the emigration from Ireland has been a curse to that country.

2. That this emigration has been occasioned by the eviction of the rural population by their landlords.

3. That acts of eviction in Ireland are to be attributed rather to the cruelty and injustice of the landlords than to any failure on the part of those evicted to fulfil their legitimate obligations.

4. That the present discontent in Ireland has been chiefly occasioned by the iniquity of the laws affecting the tenure of land.

5. That a change in those laws in a specified direction would pacify discontent and create agricultural prosperity.

A glance at any national newspaper or at the reports of an Irish debate, will show that I have not misrepresented the gist of the remarks to which I refer: "Millions of human beings have been driven across the Atlantic by the landlords of Ireland;" "Landlordism is the curse of the country;" "Emigration and the misery of the people is occasioned by the injustice of Parliament, and the iniquity of the laws which regulate the tenure of land;" "Ireland presents us with the spectacle of a whole nation fleeing from their oppressors;"—are the ordinary phrases in use.

Now, Sir, are these things true? That is the inquiry I propose to prosecute.

First, Has the Irish exodus, as it has been termed, been a calamity or the reverse?

We have to consider this question from two points of view, inasmuch as it has affected the condition of two classes of persons, namely, those who went away, and those who stayed at home.

There is one single fact which will probably be accepted as a safe indication of the effects of emigration on the destinies of those who took part in it. To their immortal honour, within 17 years after their departure they had sent back to Ireland upwards of 13,000,000l. of money,^[1] chiefly for the purpose of enabling their friends to follow their example. Now, unless they had prospered, these savings could not have been accumulated; unless their new existence had been full of promise they would not have tempted their brethren to join them. But what if, instead of setting forth to reap the golden harvests of the West, these forlorn multitudes had remained pent up within their rainy valleys, would the existing population, those that have clung to the old country in spite of everything,—would they be now the better or the worse? Two obvious consequences must have followed,—wages would have been lower, rents higher than they are now, while a very large proportion of the peasantry would be occupying farms half the size of those they arc at present cultivating. Now, low wages and high rents may be advantageous in a certain sense to the manufacturer, to the landlord, and to the recruiting sergeant; but how do they affect the masses—the tenant, the labourer, and the mechanic ?

When I was in the west of Ireland some 18 years ago, the rate of agricultural wages varied from half-a-crown to five shillings a week.^[2] Ever since, it has gradually advanced—in some places it has doubled—in others it has more than doubled. In the north, the farm servant has become almost master of the market, and is certainly better off than many of the small tenants;—in the south, though still not paid as he should be, his position is much improved, while, all over the country, the navvy, the quarryman, and the drainer are receiving from 10s to 12s a week.^[3]

Occasionally complaints are being made of a dearth of hands: it is true this outcry generally means that at particular seasons of pressure, farmers can no longer turn into their fields at a moment's notice the crowd of ill-paid cottiers that used to wait their pleasure in enforced idleness during the slack seasons of the year.^[4]

But any temporary inconvenience of this kind will be more than counterbalanced by the necessity which will be imposed on the landed interest, whether proprietors or tenants, to guarantee to those they wish to retain in their service,

comfortable lodging, fair remuneration, and above all, permanent employment. It is this growing difficulty of obtaining an unlimited amount of casual labour at low rates during summer, that is weaning the embarrassed tenant from his yearning after land. Eventually those only will be able to engage in farming with advantage who can either reduce their need of the labourer to a minimum, or can afford to pay him good wages all the year round. Hitherto the agricultural class has been composed too exclusively of occupiers, who though able to perform the ordinary operations required on their farms during two-thirds of the year, were dependent at seed time and harvest on a half-employed labouring population, who were relegated to idleness and penury, the moment the grain was sown, or stored.^[5] A worse distribution of industry could not be imagined. What we want are fewer indigent occupiers and more constant employment for the labourer; for it is quite evident that an area cultivated by 10 farmers and 15 farm servants in constant work, would be better managed than if it were subdivided amongst 15 farmers who gave only occasional employment to 15 labourers.^[6]

To those who closely watch the transitional phases of our national life, it is very evident that

the foregoing and other cognate agencies are gradually emancipating the farming classes from the tyranny of competition. During the last few years many a struggling tenant has been tempted by the rise of wages to hand his farm over to his more competent neighbour, and himself to pass from a life of precarious husbandry into the disciplined ranks of labour, where his industry is both better remunerated, and employed to a better purpose than ever it was before: and in proportion as the peasant becomes aware of the existence of a more hopeful theatre for his industry, whether at home or abroad, than that presented to him and his children by the miserable patch he miserably cultivates, that morbid hunger for a bit of land which has been the bane of Ireland will gradually subside; competition will relax something of its suicidal energy; and in the same way as the Irish labourer has already risen from the condition of a serf to an equality of comfort with his employer, will the tenant farmer, relieved from the lateral pressure of his superfluous associates,

be able to treat with his landlord on more independent terms.

But it may be objected by those who deplore emigration, that had these vanished thousands remained among us production would have been stimulated, and the well-being of the whole community proportionately increased. Let us see how far this would be a reasonable expectation.

Had no emigration taken place from Ireland, and had the population continued to multiply at its normal rate, the additional increase to our present numbers would by this time have amounted to three millions of souls, and as there is no reason to suppose that such a circumstance would have materially expanded the restricted manufacturing operations of the country, the larger proportion of these three millions would have had to depend upon the land for their support. Now, it appears from an official Report, drawn up on the conjoint authority of Archbishop Whately, Archbishop Murray, and Mr. Moore O'Farrell, that in 1846 five persons were employed in the cultivation of the soil of Ireland for every two that cultivated the same quantity of land in Great Britain, while the agricultural produce of Great Britain was four times the agricultural produce of Ireland.^[7] As a matter of fact, therefore, so far as the past is concerned, the addition to the agricultural produce of Ireland has not been proportionate to the excess of the agricultural population.

It may, however, be pretended that so unsatisfactory a result is to be accounted for by the unintelligent method in which this redundancy of labour has been applied to the soil. But in the Lothians of Scotland, and in certain parts of England, the art of agriculture is neither unintelligently nor unsuccessfully practised, and probably a given space is there made to produce as remunerative a crop as the united efforts of man and nature are destined to accomplish;^[8] yet in those localities it has been found that about 18 men, with a small proportion of women, are sufficient to cultivate in the most efficient manner 500 acres of arable land.

Were we to apply this proportion to the 15,832,892 acres of land, under cattle and crops in Ireland, we shall see that some half million of persons would be able to cultivate the entire area.^[9] But by the census returns of 1861 the number of adult males engaged in agricultural pursuits in that country are considerably over a million. Consequently, notwithstanding the emigration which has

taken place, the disproportion between the respective amounts of agricultural labour, and the area cultivated in the two countries, which was noted in 1846 by Archbishop Murray and his colleagues as being in the ratio of 5 to 2, may still be taken as about 2 to 1. Of course, as I have already observed in a previous publication,^[10] such a comparison can only be regarded as a rough approximation. On the one hand the canon which regulates the proportion of men to acres in a country of large farms, cannot be applied without modification to an area subdivided into such small holdings as prevail in Ireland, while on the other a correction must be made for the predominance of pasture lands in the one kingdom, and of tillage in the other. Making however every allowance for these counter considerations, it is probable that at the date of our last census, some three hundred thousand persons were engaged in the cultivation of the soil in excess of those whose exertions, if directed with greater skill and energy, and accompanied by an adequate expenditure of capital, would be sufficient to ensure us as high a rate of production as is obtained in the sister country.

Consequently, even making allowance for the decrease of the agricultural population which has since been going on, it is probable that there is still in Ireland a considerable section of the inhabitants with their wives and children dependent for their support upon the land, whose misapplied industry is as unproductive as if it were devoted to the grinding of a treadmill or the lifting of shot; but though contributing nothing to the producing power of the class with which they are incorporated, they have to be supported out of its profits, of which they diminish by so much the share to the remainder. To deny this is to assert—that you can make a vessel sail faster by doubling the complement of her crew, and that the supernumerary hands will have made no impression on the ship's rations by the end of the voyage.^[11] But if, instead of the reduced numbers at present left in this false position, the hundreds of thousands who have emigrated had remained at home to breed and stagnate on the overburdened soil, is it not evident that a state of things would now exist in Ireland such as no man can think of without a shudder? I do not wish, however, to imply that the existing surplus of agricultural labour, need necessarily follow their example. When once the rate of wages in a country has reached a point, which ensures to the labourer the necessaries and decencies of life, emigration ceases to be of such

paramount importance, and no man could contemplate the expatriation of so many brave hearts, and strong right arms with equanimity. The true remedy for the anomaly I have indicated, is to be found in the development of our commercial enterprize, of our mineral resources, of our manufacturing industry:^[12] it is not blood-letting to relieve a plethora, but stimulants to restore the balance of a congested circulation that are needed.

Still less would I advocate an attempt to divert, whether by moral pressure or otherwise, any portion of the land-occupying class from their present avocations. Persons of practical experience are aware that even in the most prosperous parts of Ireland, the extension of holdings undesirably diminutive, is continually taking place by a natural process, which need never involve the violent displacement of a single individual, and at a rate which rather exceeds than otherwise, the accumulation of the necessary capital in the hands of those, to whose farms the surrendered scraps of land are annexed. Death, bankruptcy, failing health, and the hundred casualties which diversify the current of human affairs, annually place at the disposal of the landlord a number of vacated tenancies, more than sufficient to carry out any amount of judicious consolidation. To hasten, therefore, the transition which the agricultural system of Ireland is gradually undergoing, is neither his interest nor his practice. It is true the slower the absorption of the surplus agricultural labour of the country into other pursuits, the worse for the general body of cultivators, but each year is improving their situation, and it is better the conviction of what is for their true advantage should penetrate their intelligence of its own accord, than that their prejudices should be shocked by any extraneous influences, however well intentioned.

But to imagine that even the most scrupulous observance of this rule, by every landlord in Ireland, could ever have prevented, or can now check the departure of a large proportion of the people is a delusion. The increase of every nation must be limited by the extent and capabilities of the area it occupies, and the amount of capital it possesses.^[13]

This law is of universal application, though one race from its more sordid habits, or lower civilization, may be more compressible than another.^[14] But, the appointed limits once reached, either the procreative energies of the people will be artificially restricted, as has been the case in France,^[15] or

the surplus population will emigrate, as they have done from Germany, from Ireland, and to a lesser degree from England.

Up to the year 1846 the soil of Ireland retained the capacity of producing, to an almost unlimited extent, a certain root, containing all the elements necessary for the support of human life.^[16] The

expansion of the population was proportionate to the facilities it enjoyed for obtaining sustenance. Suddenly, by the visitation of God, those facilities were withdrawn; the potato failed; no other product of the soil existed to take its place; corn crops neither supplied the same amount of nutriment, nor could they be grown in successive years on the same spot. The life-sustaining power of the soil, had become restricted; as an inevitable consequence the population of the island has become proportionately restricted; and; exactly in the same way as the working classes of Manchester would have been obliged to remove to other centres of industry had the cotton famine continued, has the surplus population of Ireland been compelled to emigrate to a more fertile soil.

Though acting with diminished energy, the same causes may be expected for some time to come to produce similar results. The natural expansion of a prolific nation, still numbering upwards of five millions and a half, must be considerable. Did this increase maintain its normal rate, we might calculate on a net annual addition of 60,000 souls to our population; but as a large proportion of those who emigrate are men and women in their first youth, we must presume it has been considerably checked: putting however the excess of births over deaths at a minimum of 40,000 per annum, we shall confront a very formidable figure.^[17] How are these successive waves of fresh arrivals to be accommodated?

Even those who most deplore emigration would not recommend a resubdivision for their benefit of holdings whose size at this moment is perhaps below the desirable average:^[18] the labour market is only too amply supplied: agitation has succeeded in burking everywhere, except in Ulster, our nascent manufacturing enterprise;^[19]what other alternative have you to offer, if you shut up their path across the sea? During the last five or six years, the emigration from Ireland has been a little over 90,000 a year; nearly one half of that emigration, therefore, has merely harmonized with the mechanical law, which only permits the introduction of water at one end of a pipe by the expulsion of a corresponding volume at the other.

In all parts of the world similar processes are occurring, and it is absurd to talk of Ireland, as the only country from which an extensive emigration has proceeded. From Germany alone, and principally from the North and West of Germany, as many as 250,000 persons have emigrated in a single year,^[20] while between 1851 and 1861, even from

Great Britain, the emigration has averaged as high as 74,000 a year.^[21]

Still more unreasonable is it to describe the "ruling classes" as standing alone in their opinion, an opinion, most unjustly ascribed to "their stupidity and selfishness," that emigration has been no calamity to Ireland.

In the first place, to call emigration a calamity, implies a confusion of ideas.

Emigration may be occasioned by a calamity: it maybe followed by disastrous consequences: but it is in itself a curative process: and to confound it with the evils to which it affords relief, would be as great a blunder as to mistake the distressing accidents of suppuration for symptoms of mortification. Plans for the express purpose of stimulating emigration have been devised and advocated from time to time by such men as Mr. Smith O'Brien, Sir Thomas Wyse, Mr. Sharman Crawford, Sir George C. Lewis,^[22] and Mr. Cobden;^[23] while, did space permit, I might furnish dozens of quotations to show how common this conviction has been to every school of politics and class of society.^[24]

To attribute such a view to landlord stupidity and selfishness is even more gratuitous. When did a tradesman ever complain of the multitude of his customers, or a manufacturer of the easiness of the labour-market? And what is the owner of an estate other than a trader in land? His tenants are his customers; the more strenuous their competition, the higher his rents, and the denser their number, the more keenly will they compete;^[25] emigration has a tendency to diminish rather than to increase his rental, and if it has not done so already it is because the number of those who seek to obtain their living by the land, are still out of proportion to the area capable of maintaining them.

Again, the landlord is very often a large employer of labour. Within the last 15 years I myself have paid away upwards of £60,000 in wages alone. During the last half of that period, in consequence of the rise in wages, I have got much less for my money than I did during the first half, and my consequent loss, comparing one period with another, would amount to several thousand pounds, and this has been a direct consequence of emigration. But, though a dealer in land, and a

payer of wages, I am, above all things, an Irishman, and as an Irishman I rejoice at any circumstance which tends to strengthen the independence of the tenant farmer, or to add to the comforts of the labourer's existence.

But it is said, that though as yet no inconvenient diminution of the agricultural population has occurred, as is proved by the still inadequate rate of wages in the rural districts, emigration is acquiring a momentum which will carry it for beyond all reasonable limits.^[26] This I admit to be a contingency deserving serious attention: but the first precaution to be taken is to fix those classes most exposed to the current, in a position of such comfort and stability as will enable them to resist its influence. Such an object will be far more surely promoted by whatever tends to abate the tyranny of competition, than by offering those who are now hustling one another off the land any artificial inducements to continue the seramble.

Others suggest that the great works of irrigation and reclamation which still require to be executed in Ireland, would more than absorb all the redundant population. To this I reply, in the first place, that during the very period which has witnessed the greatest emigration, larger areas have been reclaimed, than have ever been before;^[27] that the productive powers of the soil have been increasing in a ratio nearly corresponding to that at which the population has diminished; and that as we still have one adult cultivator to every six acres of land under crops, it is not any want of hands which hinders the island being converted into a garden from one end to the other. In the next place, the very thing I desire, is to see our surplus labour power, now frittered away in the desultory cultivation of fields which ought to produce twice as much with one-third fewer hands, intelligently applied to the development of the country's resources. All that I contend for is, that while you are collecting your capital,^[28] and organizing your plans, for the introduction of that millenium of enterprise which has already disappointed the hopes of previous generations, you have no right to keep the men, whose grand-children you may perhaps eventually provide with employment, standing idle and starving in the market-place.^[29]

Again, it is asked, what is to become of the manufacturing industry of Great Britain if the normal flow of Irish labour should suddenly run dry? How are the armies of England to be recruited if the magic shilling no longer has attractions for the Irish peasant?

With such ill-omened surmises as these I have no sympathy. However serious the contingencies suggested, it is very certain the solution must be sought elsewhere than in the maintenance of a fourth of the population of Ireland at starving point. A perennial flow of cheap labour into Lancashire and of broken Irishmen into the Queen's service, means perennial indigence and discontent in Munster and Connaught;—and discontent in her Southern provinces means the perpetual abstraction from the available forces of the Empire of a garrison nearly as large as the military contingent furnished by all Ireland. To foster, therefore, an excess of population with the intention of forcing the most desperate of their numbers to

embrace an existence which the gradual improvement in his condition has taught the Highland gillie and the Kentish yokel to disdain, is hardly a remunerative speculation.^[30] Of the humanity of regarding the sister kingdom as a reservoir of impoverished war material, and stagnant labour-power, to be turned on as the convenience of England may require, I will say nothing. Even the butcher fattens his sheep before he drives them to the shambles, and to speculate on Irish destitution to man the looms of Manchester for all eternity, seems to me hardly more excusable than to advocate the continuance of slavery in the tropics, for the sake of fine cotton and cheap sugar.

Notwithstanding therefore all that has been said to the contrary, I still consider that not only has emigration been an infinite blessing to Ireland, but that for some years to come a considerable portion of the nation will continue to profit by its advantages. I am aware that this is an unpopular opinion, and I may be told that I am rejoicing in the ex-patriation of my countrymen, but to those who can attach such a meaning to the foregoing sentences, it would be idle to address further explanation. Both in Parliament and elsewhere I have recorded my conviction that were it not for the agitation which now scares capital from her shores, and prevents the development of her industrial resources, Ireland might be rendered capable of sustaining a population far larger than any she has ever borne, and no one has deplored in more emphatic terms than myself the circumstances which compel so many noble-hearted Irishmen to leave the land of their birth.^[31] But to lament an emigration you are unable to arrest, and which is composed of those you cannot employ, is a useless waste of feeling. There are few human passions with which I have greater sympathy, or which I can better understand, than the love of home; but in this life no one can arrange his destiny altogether to his taste; and to sally forth and battle with the world is one of the most universal conditions of existence. It is all very well to talk pathetically of the hardship endured by the Irish peasant in quitting the home of his childhood, but to dwell for ever in the home of one's childhood is almost the rarest earthly luxury which can be mentioned; not one man in ten thousand expects to enjoy it; no woman desires it. Law in France, custom in America discourage such permanent arrangements, while in England they are only within the reach of a comparatively small minority.

Expatriation is undoubtedly a great calamity, but emigration does not necessarily imply expatriation. Hundreds of those who go, return, and if the greater number stay it is only because they prefer to do so. Nor, when Providence spread out the virgin prairies of the New World, or stored up the golden treasures of Australia, can it have been intended that attachment to the natal soil should become so predominant a passion as to deter man from taking possession of the new territories prepared for his reception. Far then from being in itself a calamity, emigration is an essential element in the future progress of the United Kingdom, and our fellow countrymen who depart, even if absorbed by an alien community, often minister to our prosperity more effectually than when they dwelt amongst us. The transformation of an indigent and disaffected subject into a prosperous foreign customer is a change not wholly disadvantageous, and the industry which has gone forth to till the prairies of the West cheapens the loaf to millions in the old country.^[32]

One thing at all events is certain. In the progress of every civilized community, the period must arrive when the natural increase of population overtakes the normal rate of production. The true remedy may be to communicate additional fertility to the soil: but this is seldom an immediate possibility:^[33] as a consequence the rate of increase of the population must be checked; or its standard of comfort must deteriorate; or its accruing surplus must remove.^[34] But the first necessitates an artificial and often an unnatural social system, as is said to prevail in France;^[35] and the next is an alternative which entails the physical degradation we have seen supervene in Ireland. There remains therefore the third,—a course in perfect harmony with the laws of nature, and one which has already established the religion, the language, and the freedom of England, over one-fourth of the habitable globe. To lament the exhibition of so much enterprise, vital energy, and colonising power, in the race to which we belong,^[36] seems to me more

perverse than to stigmatize as a curse the blessing originally pronounced on those who were first bidden "to go forth and multiply and replenish the earth"

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1. See Appendix, p. 36.
2. The following extract sufficiently describes the former condition of the Irish Labourer: " The earnings of the Labourers come on an average of the whole class from 2s to 2s 6d per week or thereabouts upon the year round. " Their food commonly consists of dry potatoes, and with these they are at times so scantily supplied as to be obliged to stint themselves to one spare meal in the day. They sometimes get a herring or a little milk, but never get meat except at Christmas, Easter and Shrovetide."—Report of Commission of 1834 on Condition of the People of Ireland. See Appendix, p, 37.
3. There seems to be a difference of opinion as to what is to be taken as the present rate of wages in Ireland. This is probably occasioned by wages varying in different localities, but to the best of my belief the above is a correct view of the general state of the case. For further information on the subject see Appendix, p, 37. See also Answers to Queries, pp. 278, 280.
4. See Appendix, p. 37, and Answers to Queries, p. 283, and Mr. Robertson's Report, p. 350.
5. "Of the four seasons, two—the spring and autumn—are passed by our farmers in industry, however injudiciously applied. The summer and winter are too frequently passed by them in idleness."—Dig. Dev. Corn. Summary, p. 366. "No fact seems established more clearly by the Land Commission evidence, than that employment for the agricultural labourers is almost universally deficient."—Ibid. p. 473. "The wretched condition of the labourers in Ireland is a necessary consequence of this deficiency of employment. The supply of labourers being so much greater than the demand for them, the employers are able to rate their wages at the lowest amount which will support life."—Ibid. p. 474. "Every searching inquiry shows how extensively the want of employment and the want of enlightenment in their art influence the numberless indications of social derangement in Ireland, whether resulting in the miseries or crimes by which her  people are characterized. No tariff upon land or rent can possibly dry up these two copious springs of national evil; and until they are dried up our crimes and our miseries will probably continue."—Dig. Dev. Com. p. 76.

   "In a country in which farms are in general too small to afford employment for hired labour, a peasant has scarcely a chance of being able to gain a livelihood, unless he obtain possession of land; and in Ireland the competitors for land are so numerous that the price paid for the use of it has reached a degree of exorbitancy unheard of elsewhere: such keen competition clearly shows that population is excessive, that is to say that the labouring class is too numerous in proportion to the amount of employment for it; but it would be a mistake to regard this redundancy of population as a consequence of the prevalence of small farms,"—Thornton's Peasant Prop. p. 188.

   "From these premises it may be inferred that the present misery of the Irish peasantry is of no recent origin, but has been from time immemorial an heirloom in the race. The number of labourers has always been greatly in excess of the demand for labour, and the remuneration of labour has consequently never been much more than sufficient to procure the merest sustenance."—Dig. Dev. Com. Summary, p. 195.

   Though these observations are less applicable now than when originally made, there is still too much truth in them.

6. We should probably exceed the truth if we said that a third part of the Irish labouring population were employed all the year round. The remaining-two thirds obtain work at the seasons of extraordinary demand, viz., at the potato-digging,  and during the harvest. — Sir G. Lewis on Irish Disturbances, p. 312.

   The remedy wanted for this state of things is to alter the mode of subsistence of the Irish peasant: to change him from a cottier living upon land to a labourer living upon wages: to support him by employment for hire instead of by a potatoe-ground. This change can only be effected by consolidating the present minute holdings, and creating a class of capitalist cultivators, who are able to pay wages to labourers, instead of tilling their own land with the assistance of the grown-up members of their family.— Ibid, p. 319.

7. See Appendix, p. 37.
8.  Probably the gross produce per acre obtained by spade cultivation in parts of Flanders is greater—though not very much greater than what is raised from a corresponding area in well cultivated districts in England and Scotland, but the amount of profit enjoyed by the British agriculturist on the transaction is much higher than that obtained by the Belgian cultivator. In comparing Belgium with England, however, it must always be remembered that a great part of Belgium was originally a sand-bank, and that even if the acreable amount of produce in the two countries were the same, Belgian agriculture would have evinced a greater "energy of production." The comparative yield per acre of England, Belgium, and Lombardy, is thus given by M. de Laveleye.

   "Sous le rapport du produit brut, la Belgique se trouverait ainsi en premiere ligne parmi les Etats européens et les chiffres de la statistique viendraient confirmer ce que nous avait fait entrevoir l'observation directe. Elle ne le céderait qu'à l'Angleterre proprement dite, prise indépendamment de l'Êcosse et de l'Irlande, et a la Lombardie; car la premiere produit, d'après M. de Lavergne, 200 francs par hectare, et la seconde, d'apès M. Jaciui, 400 millions sur uu peu plus de 2 millions d'hectare, c'est à dire autant que l'Angleterre."

   Eco. Rurale, p. 229

   It is all a question of working at high or low pressure. By putting on more steam, I can add almost indefinitely to the speed of my ship, but at so rapidly increasing a cost of fuel, that the amount of coal expended in obtaining the last half knot exceeds the entire quantity necessary to produce the total velocity previously acquired. Now, though reasonable expedition may increase the profits on my cargo, it would not pay me to buy that expedition at a cost which would reduce those profits to a minimum. In the same way, there must be a point beyond which the increase of produce obtained by the application of additional labour to the soil will be less than sufficient to cover the cost of that labour. To adopt the rate of the gross produce as an unfailing test of the prosperity of the cultivators is therefore fallacious; a high rate of production is quite compatible with small profits and low wages. Whether it is better to subsoil with a plough at £1. 10s per acre, or to trench with spade labour at from £8. to £12. an acre, must be left to the discretion of the individual agriculturist. See Appendix, p. 38.

9. "The extent of land in Ireland, either already cultivated, or capable of cultivation, may be stated at eighteen millions of acres, which, at the rate of one person for every twenty-eight acres, the proportion usual in England, would furnish work for 642,000 male adults."—Thornton's Peasant Proprietors, p. 211. See Appendix, p. 38.
10. Contributions to an Enquiry into the State of Ireland. Murray, 1866.
11.  "In all countries which have passed beyond a rather early stage in the progress of agriculture, every increase in the demand for food occasioned by increased population will always, unless there is a simultaneous improvement in production, diminish the share which on a fair division would fall to each individual." Mill's Principles of Political Economy, Vol. I. p. 237.

    "If the growth of human power over nature is suspended or slackened, and population does not slacken its increase; if with only the existing command over natural agencies those agencies arc called upon for an increased produce, this greater increase will not be afforded to the increased population, without either demanding on the average a greater effort from each, or on the average reducing each to smaller ration out of the aggregate produce."—Ibid. Vol. I. p. 240.

    "From this results the important corollary, that the necessity of restraining population is not peculiar to a condition of great inequality of property. A greater number of people cannot, in any given state of civilization, be collectively so well provided for as a smaller. The niggardliness of nature, not the injustice of society, is the cause of the penalty attached to over-population. It is in vain to say, that all mouths which the increase of mankind calls into existence, bring with them hands. The new mouths require as much food as the old ones, and the hands do not produce as much. If all instruments of production were held in joint property by the whole people, and the produce divided with perfect equality among them, and if in a society thus constituted, industry were as energetic and the produce as ample as at present, there would be enough to make all the existing population extremely comfortable but when that population had doubled itself, as, with the existing habits of the people, under such an encouragement, it undoubtedly would in little more than twenty years, what would then be their condition? Unless the arts of production were in the same time improved in an almost unexampled degree, the inferior soils which must be resorted to, and the more laborious and scantily remunerative cultivation which must be employed on the superior soils, to procure food for so much larger a population, would, by an insuperable necessity, render every individual in the community poorer than before. If the population continued to increase at the same rate, a time would soon arrive when no one would have more than mere necessaries, and, soon after, a time when no one would have a sufficiency of those, and the further increase of population would be arrested by death."—Ibid. Vol. I. p. 238.

12. I have never seen this view more admirably set forth than in the last pastoral of the Catholic Archbishop of Cashel.
13. "It is also evident that the quantity of produce capable of being raised on any given piece of land is not indefinite. This limited quantity of land, and limited productiveness of it, are the real limits to the increase of production." "From the preceding exposition it appears that the limit to the increase of production is twofold; from deficiency of capital, or of land."—Mill's Political Economy, Vol. I. p. 220.
14. "The desire to become possessed of one of these gardens operates very strongly in strengthening prudential habits and in restraining improvident marriages. Some of the manufacturers in the canton of Argovie told me that a townsman was seldom contented until he had bought a garden, or a garden and house, and that the town labourers generally deferred their marriages for some years, in order to save enough to purchase either one or both of these luxuries." —Mill's Political Economy, Vol. I. p. 357.

    "In some parts of Switzerland," says Mr. Kay, "as in the canton of Argovie for instance, a peasant never marries before he attains the age of 25 years, and generally much later in life; and in that canton the women very seldom marry before they have attained the age of thirty."—Ibid. Vol. I. p. 357.

15.  "Un jeune ménage .... échappant par une stérilité systématique aux charges du mariage pousse rapidement sa fortune, .... Ceux au contraire .... qui conservent la tradition des mariages féconds ne sortent pas de la condition de salariés."—La Reforme Sociale en France par M. F. le Flay. Paris, 1866, p. 388.

    "Whether a system which discourages marriage or delays it to a later age than that intended by nature, or checks fecundity by mechanical expedients, can be justly considered beneficial, is another question: in my own opinion, a race that marries, produces children, and populates the world, enjoys a happier destiny. The town population of France, excluding Savoy, Savoy Haute, and Alpes Maritimes, as they were not included in 1856, was 9,844,828 in 1856, and 10,644,401 in 1861, the increase per cent in the five years was 8·12 or 1·57 per cent per annum. The rural population, excluding the above new departments, was 26,194,536 in 1856, and 26,072,853 in 1861: there was therefore a decrease in the rural population; the decrease per cent of the population in the five years being ·47 or ·09 per cent per annum.

    The French returns make the town and rural population to have increased as follows: — See Appendix, p. 34.  

    Increase per cent in the five years	9·60	Town.
    Increase per cent„in the five years„	1·53	Rural.

    Thus making the rural population increase instead of decrease, but this is not correct, as they have excluded Savoy, Savoy Hautes, and the Alpes Maritimes, in 1856, but included them in 1861. See App. p. 34.

16.  "A close analysis of this subject would probably lead to the conclusion, that the potato is the main cause of that inertia in the population, and that want of improvement in the lands and tillage, which is so striking throughout Ireland. "This root, as compared with other food stuffs grown in this climate, supplied the largest amount of human food on the smallest surface. Its peculiar cultivation enabled the occupier of land to plant it in the wettest soils; because the ridge or lazy bed, universally adopted in such cases, supplied the most minute system of drainage that can be imagined for that one crop, although it did not permanently drain the land, or extend any substantial benefit in that respect even to the following crop.

    "The indolent occupier, therefore, passed his winter inactively, consuming this food which he preferred to all others, and neglecting to prepare his land permanently for more profitable crops, of which he had heard little, and for which he cared less. Enjoying all the while the pleasing delusion, that, as sure as the spring came round, any portion he might select of his farm would be ready to receive his favourite root, and to furnish a certain supply of food for his numerous and increasing family.

    "This delusion is now broken, but its evil consequences continue."—Digest. Devon Commission, Summary. p. 16.

17. See Appendix, p. 35.
18.  

    Number of holdings not exceeding	1	acre,	48,653,
    Number of holdings not exceeding„	5	acre,„	82,037,
    Number of holdings not exceeding„	15	acre,„	176,308
    			306,998

    This is more than one-half of the entire number of farms in Ireland. Of the remainder, 136,578 are less than 30 acres in extent. Census, 1861.

19.  "Political excitement and agrarian outrage tend to discourage the introduction of English capital, limit the competitors in the market for those mortgaged estates that are sold, prevent the relief of the mortgager by a diminished rate of interest, and therefore cripple his means of assisting his tenantry, while they at the same time estrange the feelings of the tenant from the landlord, their interest being inseparable, and the progress of improvement being entirely dependent on their mutual co-operation.

    "Thus we find, that the original causes, ignorance and want of employment, with their numerous evil effects, act and re-act upon each other in every possible variety of ways that can be imagined, to increase the miseries and disorders of society; and these destructive consequences must continue and extend until the original causes be removed by the sound instruction and profitable employment of the people. "The present failure of the crop, as it renders utterly hopeless the position of those classes who have hitherto depended upon an acre of potatoes for their annual subsistence, will facilitate any humane measure which may be applied with a view to placing them where their labour may afford a more certain means of livelihood."—Dig. Devon Commission, Summary, p. 321.

20. To those who will only regard emigration as the exponent of landlord cruelty, I would suggest that inasmuch as a very considerable emigration has been taking place from countries where these evil influences do not prevail, it may not be unreasonable to suppose that some one or other of those natural causes, which are noted by M. Jules Duval in his History of Emigration, as having occasioned emigration from Germany, viz.: a difficulty of procuring subsistence at home, low wages, bad harvests, an excessive subdivision of the land, and the attraction of the gold fields, have also promoted emigration from Ireland.
    It has been objected that the population of Germany is 40,000,000, and the population of Ireland only 5,500,000; but in Germany 30,000,000 of people did not subsist on the potato, and the failure of the potato in Germany was not the same  calamity that it was in Ireland. On the other hand, it would probably be as fallacious to distribute the German Emigration over the entire German nation, as to credit England with a proportional share in the emigration from the United Kingdom. M. Duval especially notes that hardly any emigration takes place from Austria. I give M. Duval's statistics of the German Emigration up to the end of the last decade. Number of Emigrants from Germany from the year 1847 to 1856:—

    1847		. . .	109,531
    1848		. . .	81,895
    1849		. . .	89,102
    1850		. . .	82,404
    1851		. . .	112,547
    1852		. . .	162,301
    1853		. . .	162,568
    1854		. . .	251,931
    1855		. . .	81,968
    1856		. . .	98,573
    1857		. . .	108,000 (total of the 3 years.)
    1858
    1859

    I also append the Official Statistics of the Immigration into the United States for 1860. Immigrants from Great Britain and Ireland, 107,308; Germany, 86,675; British North American Provinces, 29,189; Norway, 8,075; France, 4,950; Switzerland, 2,704; Sweden, 4,523; Denmark, 1,769; Italy, 1,028; Holland, 1,314; Belgium, 1,185.

    Of late the Immigration from Germany seems to have been on the increase. The following returns have been made by the New York Commissioners of Emigration for the past year (1866). Immigrants from Germany, 106,716; Ireland, 68,047; England, 36,186; other countries, 22,469.

21. See Appendix, p. 39, Some Observations of the Duke of Argyll and Sir John M'Neill on Emigration from the Highlands of Scotland.
22. See Appendix, p. 34.
23.  "But, unhappily, the maladies of Ireland have taken such deep root, that legislation cannot hope, for ages to come, effectually to eradicate them, whilst here is a mode by which hundreds of thousands of our fellow-creatures are eager to be enabled to escape a lingering death. Surely under such circumstances, this plan, which would leave us room to administer more effectually to the cure of her social disorder deserves the anxious consideration of our legislature.

    "Here let us demand why some forty or fifty of our frigates and sloops of war, which are now, at a time of peace, sunning themselves in the Archipelago, or anchoring in friendly ports, or rotting in ordinary in our own harbours, should not be employed by the Government in conveying these emigrants to Canada, or some other hospitable accommodation." Extract from Cobdens Political Writings. Vol. 1. p. 83.

24. "As a means of alleviating the distress occasioned by the removal of tenants, it was proposed by the Select Committee on the state of Ireland in 1832, that public money should be given in aid of such sums as may be paid by a landlord to a removed and destitute tenant, with a view to its being employed in emigration."—Digest Devon Commission, Summary, p. 1113.
25. "Rent being regulated by competition, depends upon the relation between the demand for land, and the supply of it. The demand for land depends on the number of competitors, and the competitors are the whole rural population. The effect, therefore, of this tenure (cottier tenancies) is to bring the principle of population to act directly on the land, and not, as in England, on capital. Rent, in this state of things, depends on the proportion between population and land. As the land is a fixed quantity, while population has an unlimited power of increase; unless something checks that increase, the competition for land soon forces up rent to the highest point consistent with keeping the population alive. The effects, therefore, of cottier tenure depend on the extent to which the capacity of population to increase is controlled, either by custom, by individual prudence, or by starvation and disease." Mill's Political Economy p. 392.
     "If the owners of land be liable to the imputation of usury in their bargains for rent, the best and only effectual corrective will be found in reducing the competition amongst the labourers and occupiers of land by removing the ignorance of our husbandmen, and also the impediments to the extension of employment."

    "If these two principles should prove inadequate to establish the equilibrium of the labour market in this country on a sound basis, we have still the vast resource of emigration, which, when used upon a humane principle, will improve our condition at home with extreme and certain benefit to those who leave our shores; and no other principle of emigration ought for a moment to be tolerated."—Digest Devon Commission, Summary, p. 757.

    "The only unobjectionable way of enabling tenants to obtain reasonable terms from their landlords, is to diminish the competition for land by lessening the number of competitors." Thornton's Peasant Proprietors, pp. 215-16.

26. "But, these things being as they are—though a judiciously conducted emigration is a most important resource for suddenly lightening the pressure of population by a single effort—and though in such an extraordinary case as that of Ireland, under the threefold operation of the potato failure, the poor law, and the general turning out of tenantry throughout the country, spontaneous emigration may at a particular crisis remove greater multitudes than it was ever proposed to remove at once by any national scheme; it still remains to be shown by experience whether a permanent stream of emigration can be kept up, sufficient to take off, as in America, all that portion of the annual increase (when proceeding at the greatest rapidity) which being in excess of the progress made during the same short period in the arts of life, tends to render living more difficult for every averagely-situated individual in the community. And unless this can be done, emigration cannot, even in an economical point of view, dispense with the necessity of checks to population."—Mill's Polit. Economy, p. 246.
27. Between 1844 and 1862 more than 2,000,000 acres of waste land have been reclaimed. See Appendix, p. 43.
28. "Self-evident as the thing is, it is often forgotten that the people of a country are maintained and have their wants supplied, not by the produce of present labour, but of past. They consume what has been produced, not what is about to be produced. Now, of what has been produced, a part only is allotted to the support of productive labour; and there will not and cannot be more of that labour than the portion so allotted (which is the capital of the country) can feed, and provide with the materials and instruments of production. Yet, in disregard of a fact so evident, it long continued to be believed that laws and governments, without creating capital, could create industry."—Mill's Political Economy, p. 80.
29. Mr Fawcett thus speaks of emigration in his essay on the 'British Labourer:'—"From England and Scotland, during the last fifteen or twenty years, there has been a very large emigration, although the people have not been compelled to leave these countries by so sudden and awful a catastrophe as that which caused the Irish exodus . . . . . When we reflect on the pecuniary advantages which every emigrant may reasonably expect to obtain, it seems surprising that our labourers have not left us in much greater numbers . . . . . The ordinary wages of our agricultural labourers are not more than nine or ten shillings a week; many of them live in dwellings which do not deserve the name of human habitations. . . . It seems wonderful that men who are in this condition do not emigrate en masse." Again, he says, "The truth, therefore, becomes irresistibly brought home to our minds, that if a man finds his labour is not wanted in one country he ought not to stagnate there in hopeless poverty. There is placed before him in other lands a great and glorious career: a great career, because he may become the progenitor of mighty nations; a glorious career, because he will abundantly fulfil the behests of his Maker if he causes the wilderness to become the home of civilized man. This world was made for the occupation of the human race, and it never could be intended that fertile soils should grow nothing but rank and useless vegetation. It never could be intended that rivers which might stimulate production of untold wealth should always continue to flow through solitudes; it never could be intended, we may unhesitatingly say, that scenes should continue to be viewed by no human eye, which are so beautiful, that their contemplation must make man look from Nature up to Nature's God."—The Economic Position of the British Labourer, by Henry Fawcett, M.P., p. 209.
30. See Appendix, pp. 39, 44.
31. See Appendix, p.
32. We now import nearly 2,700,000 quarters of Indian corn a year; before 1846 our imports of Indian corn only amounted to 11,000 quarters per annum. See Appendix, p. 35.
33. "Whether, at the present or any other time, the produce of industry proportionally to the labour employed, is increasing or diminishing, and the average condition of the people improving or deteriorating, depends upon whether population is advancing faster than improvement, or improvement than population. After a degree of density has been attained, sufficient to allow the principal benefits of combination of labour, all farther increase tends in itself to mischief, so far as regards the average condition of the people.—Mill's Political Economy, p. 239.
34. "But though improvement may during a certain space of time keep up with, or even surpass, the actual increase of population, it assuredly never comes up to the rate of increase of which population is capable; and nothing could have prevented a general deterioration in the condition of the human race, were it not that population has in fact been restrained. Had it been restrained still more, and the same improvements taken place, there would have been a larger dividend than there now is, for the nation or the species at large."—Ibid. p. 211.
35. "Le Partage forcé affecte à la fois la petite et la grande propriété rurale; il détruit les petits domaínes agglomérês, à familles fécondes, et les remplace par ces petits domaines morcelés où la fécondité conduit fatalement au paupérisme, et où le bien-être des individus se fonde sur la stérilité du mariagé et sur l'egoïsme."—La Reforme Sociale en France, par M. F. le Play, Vol. I. p. 396.
36. Saxon and Celt have taken an equal part in emigration from Ireland.—See Appendix, pp. 41-85.